I'm excited because I'm preparing to position myself to be able to produce 3D 360 videos for the Oculus Rift. Curious whether APV is able to produce side by side video files. If not, then I'm curious about recommendations.

Hey Andrew... That sure is a huge investment... All those camera mounted onto a plastic/rubber rig... I assuming that no one else other than those who own the Oculus Rift gear can view the video.. Or perhaps a 3D pair of glasses.. I opened the url, nothing my end.. Looks a beautiful building with lots of wood.. But no video...

Nice computer, you should do well with that.. Did you win the lotto.

So.. who is your client base... This whole VR thing seems to have taken a huge leap from just normal Virtual Tours ... to 360 Video Tours and now 3D 360 Video Tours... As great as some of this technology is.. Virtual Tours in Australia has a very limited market, more so with 360 Video Tours but not sure how the 3D 360 Video Tours would go...

Its are internet that has issues too... They are rolling out the new national broadband network but that will not be in our area for ages and it will cost a lot more to use.. For 360 video to be of any value, having a fast internet will be important..

I would love to see a demo of the 3D 360 Video Tour for sure.. At leaf the Oculus Rift is not too expensive..

Good luck with all this.... i admire your drive into this new media...

Not a lotto winner here, yet lucky for many other reasons. I'm just a die hard passionate individual that has a vision and sees opportunity. I'm taking a risk at a narrow market by throwing my life & lifesavings and every earned dollar towards the prospects of an emerging technology.

I shoot with the H3PRO10HD rig, which doesn't have a stitch template offered. This is such a young medium that there is little to no information out there yet, so I too was worried before I got the rig. But you don't need a stitching template because there is enough video overlap between all of the cameras.

Actually a stitch template isn't advised since AVP is stitching based on the video content itself. So instead of a square boxes fading together, it figures out the best region to slice and stitch together the videos. I've done many hours of shooting and never used a template. So rest at ease. you can actually test this yourself with the AVP demo and the demo datasets.http://www.autopano.net/wiki-en/action/ ... nchmarking

Something to consider is how all of these 360 rigs have parallax errors since the lens are not at the same point-of-origin. This is a constant battle to overcome. But it can be minimized as long as you don't get within 6-10 feet of the camera rig. Its even easier to fix if the camera rig is stationary.http://www.autopano.net/wiki-en/action/ ... -_Parallax

In chooseing a 3D rig, your stitch render load is going to be doubled. But your GPU setup will chow through that easily enough. You're also riding the tech bleeding edge, so you will have to experiment with 3D workflows on your own since very few are doing 360 video, let alone 360 3D video. Its a pretty big investment considering the yearly updates of the GoPro cameras. But it might be wise to get experience early too. Just some thoughts.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I feel a lot more confident now. Further more, not needing a template b/c AVG's power of stitching reaffirms my brand loyalty of Kolor & krpano. Awesome work you y'all!

Glad my thoughts were helpful! Its alot of fun to shoot in this medium but has very unique challenges. I've been shooting 360 video for the planetarium I work at and we have the added issue of keeping the camera rig extremely smooth during movement, especially since the camera rig is effectively a spaceship with the audience inside. So its been alot of trial and error. Wishing you all the best.

Very interesting. I've not heard of the Maxwell MP-101 motorized head. For the longest time I was very interested in purchasing a second camera body and a motorized head. Then I was introduced to the oculus rift and shortly after the 360 heros. After purchasing my own rift and the release of 360heros 3d video demo, I became convinced that that is the way to go.

I'm very excited to announce that I have placed the order for the 360 heros 3D rig, and it is expect to be manufactured (3D printed) over this weekend. Hopefully arriving next week or the week after. I've contacted GoPro regarding bulk purchase, and have not heard back from them. 12 GoPros comes to be very expensive... and I seemed to have forgotten that I need 12 micro SD cards when I made my bid for investment money. I will have to find a means to fund that component. (12x64GB micro sd = $1200 yikes).

I want to have the rig, so that I can capture a few scenes of SXSW interactive... or at least the SXSW music.

Look forward to sharing my results... probably with in the next upcoming month. If things fall into place well, some interesting projects may come to light.

Regarding keeping the cam movement smooth, I have my concerns about motion sickness with in the rift... sitting on a tripod should be fine. I'm curious about experimenting with flyline cable cam similar to what you see at football games, except at a concert...

I too was thinking about the sd cards... expensive... You will need fast ones to capture video... Its a huge outlay for sure.. Good luck and I really hope its all worth it for you... It will be nice to hear that your enthusiasm is rewarded by success...

..Hey.. A feature of Final Cut Pro is to level out video.. When capturing video on board a boat you might move up and down or even bounce a bit.. Final Cut can smooth that motion out but.. Not sure if I can do it with 360 video... Don't see why not..

The bit insight about Final Cut is something I'm grateful to learn more about. From what I've heard, stabilization software is essential. Not sure how it will work with 360 & in 3D... but will methodically research, experiment, and hope to perfect.

Hi Atxcloud! Really looking forward to hearing how you get on. I am also really interested in this. I own a small film studio http://www.limelight-films.com and we mostly do cinematic weddings. Other than weddings I would like to do some other projects for the rift. Such as 360 3d films putting people in really dangerous situations- such as face to face with sharks - lions etc or other things people could not do in reality. Just looking for the best solution so really looking forward to seeing how you get on. Have you tried the videos on http://www.panocam3d.com/video3d360.html? How do they compare and is there a sense of depth and 3d- Cheers!

If I may add myself to the discussion and ask an additional question: How would you prevent the left and right eye not being stitched completely the same and have the viewer looking crossed eyed or something else? You need to build two different video's for the left and right eye seperately I guess, or is it implemented in the kolor studio?

Wouldn't the video be a lot smoother setting the gopro with a smaller fov each. So instead of 360 with 4 gopro's using 6 of them?

You'll need to stitch 2 separate videos, then use the Aftereffects plugin V3 to output a side by side video. Not sure about your intentions of using 4 or 6 GoPros, my rig currently employs 12; that is 6 Gopros/eye, yielding stereoscopic spherical video coverage.

What I mean with using 6 gopro instead of 4 is this: When you use 4 gopro's to cover 360 degrees it won't be as smooth and parallax-less as using 6 gopro's to cover the 360 degrees. I was wondering if this 'statement' would still count if you would use maximum amount of gopro's 'possible'. So if it would be possible to use 30 gopro's to cover the 360 degrees it would be 'the smoothest' you can get.

Thanks for the explanation about setting the video side by side, but my concern would be if you would stitch 2 seperate videos there could be small differences between the video's and will look of when it's finished, right? Or is this something that doesn't happen quickly?

I was thinking about your project during the News this afternoon... A guy was using a 3D scanner to scan the canyons in the Blue Mountains.. With the aid of a photographer, the images he took were used to render onto the 3D scan.. A Total 3D walk through was created and viewed using a similar thing to the oculus rift. http://madspelunker.com/portfolio-view/video-format/

Its all very interesting but that technology comes at a prices.. But its really does show the future in 3D walk throughs.. To be honest, I think there is an easier and much cheaper way to do what is doing..

There are new software technologies like 123catch but Autodesk have really only copied that idea from a Russian guy who as far as I know, started the 3D from 2D images.... 3D from a 2D image is really only just beginning to get to something worth while.. There are other 3D Scanners that capture the image at the same time so no need for a photo.. It will be exciting to see where all this technology goes...

I saw a demo of a very unique 3D scanner which travels up, down and across.. Capturing everything in the room. Including the back of objects.. The problem with that was no images for added detail. It was a 3D particle cloud object..

This tech is really amazing and has a lot of potential! I've had thoughts along the lines that Mad Spelunker uses: LIDAR & Photo imaging. Been talking with some GIS folks here in austin, and even got to play with a bit cloud point data. But nothing too advance.

I've seen something like this from a polish team called ThorSkan. http://thorskan.com/ I look forward to the day that I am able to produce this kind of content. Though, I imagine that the post production is quite labor intensive.

Thank you for thinking of me and sharing this! Andrew

PS, my rig is assembled, and I've captured one test shot. Should be purchasing AVP tonight to render that test shot. I'll be meeting with a drone pilot (s800 evo) tomorrow to plan a shoot, once the winds calm down here in central Texas. Also, lining up music videos... look forward to sharing soon.

Yes Andrew, it is amazing stuff... Point Cloud allows for huge 3D files, where as polygons would be huge.. Far too big.. One thing I did not know was point clouds could be rendered.. I need to investigate that more.. I wonder if point cloud can be printed.. Jeorgen from Freedom360 is a guru with 3D printers so I might ask him.. Its all getting to be very amazing.. Pity point cloud 3D scanners cost so much, but in time they will get cheaper, and the output quality will also get better.. Its truly exciting times..

What I'm about to ask maybe more about ffmpeg than Kolor, but it is concerning content advised on Kolor's wiki. I'm hoping someone would know more about the scripting, as I'm not as experienced as others.

So last night I was somewhat successful in using ffmpeg to merge the left eye & right eye videos into one video, side by side, with the code provided by Kolor's 3D 360 wiki.

My problem is that the output yields black bands across the top & bottom. When viewing via Oculus Rift, the video becomes terribly distorted.

I downloaded the merge two mp4 but it would not work, its says is ISO but to me it look like an exe file.. I really hope Kolor has more options than this..

I am still getting my head around this since I haven't had any dealings with the 360 video at all...

I downloaded the trial version and reprocessed your videos... Now I have two MP4 and two tifs...

Now I am lost.. The tutorial is very limited... Perhaps its assuming some prior knowledge..

I relate it to.. An alien arrives on earth, you ask it to open the door.. That seems simple enough but the alien does not know what a door is..

To me, a new advanced technology really deserves a much better tutorial, assuming nothing... There needs to be lots of visual too.. This software has been available for a while now so.. where is the How To Do It... Is this the best Kolor can come up with.. http://www.autopano.net/wiki-en/action/ ... 360_videos

Hi Andrew.. I have had no luck in understanding how to merge the two mp4 movies, which I know needs to happen to view your 360 video using your Oculus Rift.. I was wondering if there would be a time when this headset could be used for a normal image VR Tour where the hot spots could be actioned in Virtual Space.. That would be so cool.. I saw a few movies with Virtual Reality so it might already be possible. I am disappointed that the KolorEye player is not supported by Android.. I wonder when that will come..

I managed to test out your 360 video and was really disappointed with the quality of stitching.. I was informed by those in the know that the poor Parallax issues was only really apparent with still 360 pano images, but your test clearly shows that this is not the case.. Perhaps operator error but.. is it or is this the expected quality were are supposed to accept from these units.. For the cost of it all, I would expect a lot better.. A LOT BETTER....!!

Your movie runs a heap better in the KolorEye player than you can see here... Having two players, running side by side, the other being the QT Player doing a screen record, slows up your 360 video which I put down to my old iMac not having the processing power needed.. More RAM has made little difference to the running of my iMac..

I am still confused.. Am I right in saying you used one of these huge heroes 3D rigs to capture the video to create two videos with 12 GoPro cameras, which when viewed will display in your Oculus Rift, but the view we get to see on a PC or Mac would be two movies playing.. How did you merge the two videos...???